Privatization Proposal Deleted From D.C. Agenda

When District of Columbia school officials gathered last week for a
forum on the superintendent's new reform plan, they jokingly beseeched
each other not to even mention "the 'P' word.''

That word, "privatization,'' came up nonetheless--on the placards of
members of the Washington Teachers Union, in the fliers distributed by
local community activists, and in heckling by locally active followers
of the political organizer Lyndon H. LaRouche.

After two months of seeing opposition from such varied forces to his
call for privatizing the management of up to 15 schools, Superintendent
Franklin L. Smith this month deleted the idea from the reform agenda he
has submitted for a school board vote this week.

Noting that he could count on only five of the board's 11 members to
support the proposal, Mr. Smith told local reporters that he did not
want a badly split board behind him if he took the leap of contracting
with a private company to run some of the system's schools. In a
statement, Mr. Smith said the board had asked him to postpone
consideration of privatization pending a year of further study of such
efforts in other cities.

"I agreed to their request so we can show, without any doubt, that
the involvement of the private sector in the public schools can be
beneficial to student performance,'' Mr. Smith said.

It was evident last week, however, that opposition to the proposal
likely would continue and that the superintendent appeared to have set
fire to a few bridges with his handling of it the first time
around.

Local business leaders, who had backed the privatization proposal,
last week reacted angrily to its being shelved, and some threatened to
withdraw their financial support for the public schools.

Leaders of the D.C. Coalition to Save Our Schools, a group of
parents and community activists, pledged meanwhile to seek Mr. Smith's
removal for proposing privatization. They objected to any of the
district's predominantly black schools being entrusted to a for-profit
firm with predominantly white management.

And a leader of the D.C. Federation of Civic Associations last week
told school board members that they would be targeted for defeat if
they voted for privatization.

Shaking Up the Status Quo

Even without the privatization proposal, the remainder of his reform
agenda is "a wake-up call to all of us,'' Mr. Smith said in a statement
issued this month.

The superintendent described much of his agenda as a continuation of
the site-based-management plan he undertook two years ago. The new plan
focuses primarily on giving individual schools more autonomy through
the decentralization of the district's financial operations, personnel
management, and provision of central-office services.

Through its implementation, the school district "will move the
control and authority from [the] central office to the local schools
and to the principals, teachers, and parents--those individuals closest
to the students,'' Mr. Smith said in announcing the plan.

As part of this strategy, the superintendent called for establishing
a network of "enterprise schools,'' which, having demonstrated their
desire and ability, would be given broad leeway to pursue innovative
programs.

The reform agenda also called for promoting school-designed
charters, or "schools within schools'' organized around broad themes;
expanding existing partnerships with the private sector, universities,
and other organizations; and offering parents more choice among an
increased number of magnet and theme schools.

Mr. Smith did not specify how he plans to finance the proposed
reforms.

'Bureaucratic Manipulation'

Jay Silberman, a school board member who had favored privatization,
last week said he supports the superintendent's overall plan because it
would give schools access to as many tools for education reform "as
they can possibly hope to choose from.''

"The direction of this reform effort is truly to get to the point of
some real school-based management--beyond the rhetoric,'' he said.

But another board member, Valencia M. Mohammed, who had opposed
privatization, said the superintendent's overall reform agenda "lacks
clear goals and objectives.''

The Institute for Independent Education, a locally based nonprofit
think tank, last week issued a report criticizing the superintendent's
proposals as "consumed by form and process, rather than substance'' and
taking him to task for not more directly addressing the issue of how to
raise student achievement and test scores.

"On the whole, the proposed solutions have the appearance of change
for the sake of change, an exercise in bureaucratic manipulation,'' the
report said.

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